You See Monsters
by Kshar
Summary: Morgan/Elle.  "They were friends who understood some things about each other, that was all."


You See Monsters  
by Kshar

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of CBS, and are used without permission.

Spoilers for "The Fisher King".

xx

Elle was reading on the plane; a thick novel with a cover she kept turning away from him whenever he looked in her direction, rather than her usual in-flight entertainment of case files and crime-scene photos. It was an unusual sight for Morgan, who'd seen her disheveled, in various states of undress, dog-tired, or spitting with anger, but never, ever relaxed.

He dialed up the volume on his music; dialed it down again. Looked around the cabin, his eyes lighting on pretty women here and there. Most of them traveling with boyfriends or husbands, he noted carefully, but it sure as hell didn't hurt to look. He just never let his eyes linger too long on anyone, and after a while he let his line of sight drift back to his left.

He was already daydreaming about white sand and drinks with little umbrellas in them when he saw Elle's mouth moving. He pulled one headphone from an ear and focused on her quizzically.

"I said, quit looking at me, I'm trying to read."

"I'm not looking at you. You got the window seat, I'm trying to see out."

Elle leveled a glance at him, and after a moment he turned his body back away from her, suppressing a grin.

"Can't see anything yet, anyway," he said.

Elle leaned forward, as he'd known she would, leaving an index finger in her book to mark her page. "All I see's the ocean."

"Soon enough there'll be a tropical paradise spread beneath us."

"Is Jamaica a tropical paradise? What about the crime rate?"

It was Morgan's turn to give her the look. "Go with me here, Elle."

"You're pretty excited about this, huh?"

"Oh, hell, yeah!" Morgan managed to hook an arm around the back of her shoulders before she settled fully back into her seat, and they leaned back together. "You and me, girl. We are going to have enough fun to make it like the last few months never happened."

Elle snorted, but out of the corner of his eye he could see her smile.

xx

They'd both gotten out of the habit of flying commercial. Morgan couldn't get himself comfortable, and Elle had this kind of out-of-sorts look about her he'd noticed before when she was in a crowd of people. His headphones lay in his lap, forgotten, and she kept looking out of the window rather than reading her book. He noticed her twitch, then relax again, when another passenger walked by their seats.

"What's going on?" he asked her when the man had passed them, keeping his voice low.

She knew what he was referring to immediately; they worked together enough to read each other well. "Not him," she said, almost under her breath. She looked at Morgan and added: "A man's walked past us twice already. He was looking at us kind of hinky."

Morgan looked over his shoulder; saw the passenger still walking, the flight attendants restocking their carts, a lone woman leaning against the safety compartment opposite the bathrooms. He turned back around.

"Bathrooms are behind us," he said. "Flying makes some people nervous."

Elle didn't smile. "I know where the bathrooms are, Morgan."

"What did he look like?"

Elle shrugged. "White. Dark hair. Thirties, maybe. Unremarkable."

"Unremarkable," he said. "Remind me again what you do for a living?"

"I'm on vacation," she said, a hint of petulance in her voice.

"You sure are."

"It's probably nothing."

"It's the job," Derek said, and tried to stretch his legs out without pushing his feet into the seat in front. Elle obligingly tucked her feet under her, and he stuck his feet diagonally between their two seats with a grateful sigh. "It makes you see monsters on every corner."

"Yeah," she said distantly.

"Let me know if you see him again, okay?"

xx

Elle's eyes looked heavy by the time they cleared customs and made it to the resort, the skin on her arms winter-white where she'd pushed back her sleeves. Morgan was, as ever, cognizant of eyes watching them as he tried to help her with her bag (the look of utter surprise and suspicion she gave him was enough to make him laugh, but they were on vacation, after all, and his mama had raised him to be a gentleman). The novelty of a black man and a white woman never got old for some people. He thought probably the man Elle had been worried about on the plane had been just nosy or racist, although it was possible he'd thought Elle was hot.

More than possible, Morgan amended in his head, watching her tuck a strand of dark hair behind one ear before sliding the magnetic key in her door lock. Working with attractive women didn't make them any less attractive, but his relationship with Elle was simple and never strayed into the lines of a strong emotional connection; never had. They were friends who understood some things about each other, that was all.

They'd made longer flights across country, but Morgan thought she looked weary because they were finally away from the team and the paperwork and the constant, driving force that kept them all going. He remembered his first vacation after joining the BAU; everything that had happened to him in those months simultaneously catching up to him and being left behind. It had reminded him a little of watching the tide go out on the beach, feeling the sand slip out from beneath his feet, even though he'd gone home to Chicago where the ground was both solid and frozen. A whole world of responsibility and pain and stress, and the slightly sad feeling of letting it go.

He caught the hint of seawater in the air in here; so different from the cold smoke of Chicago or the black-rubber scent of Virginia, and felt a sudden, fleeting wave of homesickness-it was true what they said about this job. It really did get under your skin.

"Shame we couldn't drag Reid along with us," he said. He dropped his bag on the floor of Elle's room, and turned to make sure she was okay with the door.

"You can't get everyone to do your bidding," Elle said. She put her case to the side of her bed, pushing it flat with one foot, and then she was toeing off her shoes and crawling across the bed. It took him a minute to understand where she was going; then she was tossing a still-wrapped glass at him while she raided the minibar.

"Oh, I don't know," he said, catching the glass in mid-air. "I thought I was doing pretty well so far."

He didn't quite catch her reply; she was stomach-down, her body mostly on the bed, one hand on the floor as the other rifled the bottles, making them clink together. He almost missed, too, the little bottle of scotch as it winged in the direction of his head.

"Easy, tiger," he said mildly. "You could do some damage with that throwing arm."

"You caught it. Stop bitching." She straightened and sat up, curling her legs underneath her. She had two more bottles sinking into the bed near her knees, and she was unwrapping her own water glass by tearing the paper off in strips.

Morgan shook his head and looked around for a place to sit. Failing to find a chair and not trusting his knee to the floor, he sat on the edge of the bed instead, on the side opposite Elle. He slipped the paper off his own glass, crumpled it and leaned over to drop it on the table.

Elle was clinking her glass against his and drinking before he'd even had a chance to fill his glass, and she didn't look tired anymore. In fact, her eyes were dark and sharp; her gaze never lingering on him for too long.

"I haven't had a vacation," she said. "In a very long time."

Morgan kicked his own shoes off and leaned back, making himself comfortable on the bed. He could see the moon through the wooden-slatted window. The sky looked so much clearer here.

He'd moved back as far as the pillows before she got up the courage, or the steadiness, or whatever it was with her, and crawled through the space between them, settling against his side with a sigh and balancing her glass on his upper leg.

Morgan took a sip of his drink, grimaced, and started to put the glass on the nightstand. Elle, however, had gulped her glass dry and held her hand out for his, drinking the contents before handing it back to him.

Morgan looked at the empty glass in his hand. "Gee, thanks," he said.

"Happy to help."

A long moment went by. "So," he started to say, and then her hand was on his jaw and she was kissing him and whatever it was he'd been meaning to say didn't seem so important any more.

He slipped a hand onto her back, shucking up her shirt and feeling her hot skin beneath his fingertips. Elle's skin temperature, like everything else about her, was always raging. She'd shrugged it off to metabolism when he'd mentioned it once. She burned everything to sinew and shield.

He drew back for a second, catching his breath; then leaned into her again, this time letting his tongue push against hers, then draw back, then taste her again. It had the effect he'd known it would have on Elle, who wanted control above everything else. She followed his mouth with hers, and he pulled her down against him. He could feel himself react to her weight against him, hardening in a way that was more familiar than erotic. She shifted her leg to one side to straddle him, hands busy beneath the weight of her own body, trying to unzip his jeans.

He let her struggle for a few moments, smile pulling at the corner of his mouth at her eventual grunt of frustration.

"I could help you with this, you know," he said.

Elle cursed him.

Morgan ignored her, and wrapping his own hands around hers, pushed her backwards with sudden force, hearing her yelp of surprise even as the blood rushed in his ears, and her hands were slipping free of his, because he never held hard onto her. Then she was pushing his shirt up and over his head, her touches feather-light against his suddenly too-tight skin, scraping where her fingernails hit. He shivered, a tremble starting in his spine and going straight to his cock, and he heard himself groan and Elle's hair brushed the side of his face, blocking the light then blinding him again.

xx

When he'd been teaching hand-to-hand combat at the Academy, he'd seen her fight dirty. She aimed for her opponents' lower backs, or old football injuries (Morgan himself flinched when she brought down some good ol' boy with a pointed-toe kick to the side of his reconstructed knee). One day she delivered a chop to the solar plexus that left a former Texas Ranger still gasping in breath five minutes after class ended. Morgan couldn't help smiling at her drive even as he told her to dial it down some-her technique was an issue-before all her classmates ended up being wheeled out of class. She'd reminded him a little of himself, although he usually smiled and helped his opponents off the mat after he decked them.

She never did learn to dial it down, not really, and Morgan was okay with that in the same way he could look at a crazy guy shouting salvation from a street corner in twenty-degree weather and admire his dedication. Everything about Elle was pistons firing, and if he'd slept with her then, when she was-technically-his student? That was just Elle, who went from ninety to supersonic in the time it took Morgan to catch his breath. They'd gone to a bar, her still in her Academy sweats with her hair pulled back.

"Where'd you learn your technique?" he asked her, grinning over his second beer.

"Brooklyn," she'd said, deadpan.

She'd been dressed and out of his house and on her way back to the Academy before Morgan had buttoned his pants, and she never let her gaze linger on him after it happened; never let their followup interactions get awkward. She was smooth as glass. She was a good agent.

xx

She'd noticed his attention slip away, and she started moving more slowly, questioningly.

Her teeth grazed his tongue; skin damp now where they touched, clothes abandoned where they landed; her body soft and curved and taut, goose-pimpled against his hand. He traced a line along the muscles of her stomach, the swell of her hip. His hand tangled now through the hair at the back of her head, careful not to pull her to him, always careful; her jaw was set (she takes this so _seriously_, sex with Elle is many, many things, but it is not for fun).

He was, as he always has been with her, the first one to break. They were boxed in by bad motel art and pastel walls and he could see the whole room, the bed, the two of them in his head in the minute when the silence in his ears got too much and he pressed her hip down with one hand, thrusting into her as he came. Elle bit her lip in satisfaction, hiding-he thought-a smile.

xx

He didn't think he'd made any outward sign that he wanted to leave, but Elle got in first.

"You should go find your room," she said, not looking at him.

Morgan levered himself out of the too-soft bed with his elbows and began the search for his pants. He was neither offended nor relieved. He knew Elle didn't sleep well with anyone else in the room, couldn't handle the thought of a hand on her back or her hip while she slept. He knew enough about her past not to push it; not to sneak up on her. In return, she never asked him about his relationships, if you could call them that, and had never asked him what exactly it was he was trying to prove.

He pulled his jeans over his hips, zipped up, slid his hands into his pockets to smooth the fabric against his skin. He was turning his tee-shirt right side out when a flicker of movement from Elle caught his eye. She was watching him, but when he turned his head she turned away, her back to him. He grinned to himself and dropped his shirt on the bed, stretching out beside it. He traced a hand down her back, kissing her shoulder, the small of her back, and the tattoo at the base of her spine. He'd moved on to tasting the salt on her skin before he heard her breath shorten.

"Sure I can't convince you?" he said into her skin; scent of sweat and travel and _her_ making his head start to spin again.

Elle swatted a hand backward at him, lightly. "Go on."

He stood and picked up his shirt; pulled it over his head. While he kept his eyes on her, she wrapped herself up in the sheets; her arms around her bent knees. He reached out a fist to her and she bumped it solemnly with her own. Solidarity.

"Beach tomorrow?" he asked.

"Beach tomorrow," she agreed. "Drinks with umbrellas in them. Looking for talent. It's a resort, right? Lot of single men."

"It's like you read my mind. Except for the single men thing."

His shoelaces are still untied and they slap against the floor as he shouldered his bag and then readjusted it on his shoulder. His hand was on the door before she spoke again.

"Morgan?" Her voice was unusually quiet, almost soft enough that he could have missed it. He stopped, hand still outstretched; turned back to her. "Derek?" He can still see the moon, faded now to pale bone against the yellow light in here. She's dark against the papered walls; he can't see her eyes. "We're never going to get weird about this, right?"

"No, Elle, we're never gonna get weird."

"Okay. Okay, good."

He closed the door behind him with a soft click, and waited until he heard her get up and check the lock before he walked away.

xx

End

xx

Feedback of any kind would be gratefully received. Thanks for reading.

Kshar

August 2010


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